What is Design-build?

With Fireside, your designer is your general contractor. We handle all plans, permits, sub trades, engineering, and even cleaners so all you need to do is move in.

Why Design-build?

Better Service

As homeowners ourselves, we recognize that you already have enough on your plate. We do our job so you can do yours.

Every renovation requires a team of experts whose differing personalities, opinions, and schedules can make your head spin. Communication with this team is paramount so the job doesn’t stall, have huge cost over-runs, or end up to be a big disappointment. There will be countless emails, phone calls, and emergency site visits. Rather than requiring you to juggle all these people, Fireside does it all for you. During construction, we are there on site to troubleshoot the daily challenges that always arise in renovation.

At the end of the project there’s always a few final details to finish up. We walk through the space with you, determine all loose ends, and make a plan for how to solve them quickly and expertly. Without a design-build team, this part of the process can quickly become a nightmare of warranty-haggling and finger-pointing between various trades, designers, and product-suppliers. At Fireside, we do not pass the buck; it stops with us. Additionally, we provide a 2-year warranty on all workmanship and we stand by it.

Better Value

As passionate designers, we are uniquely motivated to maximize your construction budget so we can get you the most value and largest artistic impact. 

We design toward your budget. We advise on where to save and where to splurge.

Our construction knowledge gives us the power to know where costs are allocated during the design process. As we design, we cost the project. This is a much more efficient and intelligent process. We involve our tradespeople to advise on various labour costs associated with each design option, so we can communicate budget-conscious designs and empower you to make informed decisions.

We do not hand you a complete design and then send you off to find out prices on everything. From the very start, we will help you figure out what realistic construction costs will be and how far your budget will take you. As we refine the scope of work and begin the design process, we move from rough cost estimates to more accurate numbers, all the way to an exact construction price based on your unique design.

We do two separate contracts, first for design and then for build.  We welcome you to get other construction quotes because we are committed to competitive pricing on all labour and materials. We are very familiar with up-to-date prices on all aspects of construction and if there’s somewhere we think you can save, we will work hard to find a better price so we can make the project financially feasible.

Better Designs

Because your designer is your builder, your design will be buildable. We are grounded in reality of construction and are therefore able to push the creative envelope with confidence. 

As creative types, we are control freaks. From our experience in the construction industry, we are convinced that design-build is the only model that allows us to have creative control of a project. Because we are your builder and also your designer, we are hyper-committed to making our shared design vision come to fruition. At Fireside, the whole team of carpenters and subtrades answers to the person who designed it. In the conventional non-integrated model, important design details get compromised. Things change on site, and there needs to be a creative person at the helm to make sure problems are solved elegantly.

We stubbornly insist that quality and craftsmanship are not compromised. We do not cut corners on the design to save a buck, or do something because it’s easier.

Rather than having nagging regrets about the final design and its execution, we want you to be in love with your space. Because at the end of the day, that’s the reason we do what we do.